If you're like my librarian buddy and I, you LOVE Dr. Seuss Week, also known as Read Across America. It's really just a great excuse to proclaim loudly and long how much we love to read! What can be better?!
So this year, we've started a TON of initiatives. We usually do that, by adding one on top of another until we're about to lose it and we don't think we can do one more thing. And then we're like, "...wait! What if we..." and we add one more thing. I keep expecting my principal to say, "Ladies, seriously. That's enough." But she hasn't said it yet, so we keep piling on the fun stuff!
This year, we started out with bulletin boards in preparation for Read Across America (which we are celebrating a week early by the way, so we don't have to beat up all the other literacy coaches and librarians to take their guest readers).
We downloaded an app called the Cat Cam in the app store on the iphone. It is hilarious. This is my Cat Cam photo:
We knew we wanted to take pictures of the faculty and use them to make a fun bulletin board, but to build some anticipation, I put up this partial board about three weeks before Read Across America.
The kids kept walking by, reading, "It's coming..." and speculating about what IT was!
Then we took pictures of all of the faculty using the Cat Cam app and made this fun bulletin board!
The words are too small to read in this picture, but on the left it says, "Celebrate Dr. Seuss Week, Feb. 23 - 27" (Yes, I know that's not the REAL week!) and on the right it says, "From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere!"
The kids LOVED it! They kept pointing out their teachers and giggling, especially when their teacher was Thing One!
Here's what I used to make the board:
- light blue fabric for the background
- red plastic tablecloths for the curtains
- blue painter's tape to make the "windowpanes"
- black butcher paper for the kids' silhouettes
- red butcher paper for the chairs
I projected the image of the original pin my librarian friend found of this bulletin board:
I taped some black butcher paper to the wall, and used a projector to project the image onto the black butcher paper and traced it. We cut them out. Then we did the same with the chairs on red paper.
I had stapled up the blue fabric on the board and the Dr. Seuss border my beautiful sister-in-law bought me for 80% off at an Office Depot going-out-of-business sale! We stapled up the silhouettes and the chairs and then I used the painter's tape to mark off the windowpanes, horizontally and vertically down the middle of the board.
I took the red tablecloths (we used two separate ones to make the two curtains) and I stapled the edge of one along the edge of the board. Then I stapled and scrunched all along to make the top look ruffled. I used some ribbon to tie them back like curtains.
We printed and cut out all of the Cat Cam pictures and I stapled them all up, adding the letters for the board last. Oh, and I stuck a cute paper banner I bought at Eraser Dust on top!
This is a different bulletin board I made last week, too.
We had all this adorable, brightly patterned fabric, so I thought, "Why not? Let's use it to make Seuss hills!"
I stapled the fabric...artistically? To make hills and valleys like in the book, "Oh, the Places You'll Go." Then I added another little layer in the back to look like far-away hills. The "balloons" are also made of fabric, and I stapled them around the edges and filled them with leftover fabric to make them puffy.
I recently had a realization that loofahs look like truffula trees. Well, used loofahs look more truffula-ish, but they're also disgusting, so I used some new loofahs to make our trees.
And I couldn't resist adding our school building.
What are your plans to celebrate Read Across America?
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